And then Lancelot used to try to persuade him to take poor Luke back again. But vague terror had steeled his heart.
‘What! Why, he’d convert us all! He’d convert his sisters! He’d bring his priests in here, or his nuns disguised as ladies’ maids, and we should all go over, every one of us, like a set of nine-pins!’
‘You seem to think Protestantism a rather shaky cause, if it is so easy to be upset.’
‘Sir! Protestantism is the cause of England and Christianity, and civilisation, and freedom, and common sense, sir! and that’s the very reason why it’s so easy to pervert men from it; and the very reason why it’s a lost cause, and popery, and Antichrist, and the gates of hell are coming in like a flood to prevail against it!’
‘Well,’ thought Lancelot, ‘that is the very strangest reason for it’s being a lost cause! Perhaps if my poor uncle believed it really to be the cause of God Himself, he would not be in such extreme fear for it, or fancy it required such a hotbed and greenhouse culture. . . . Really, if his sisters were little girls of ten years old, who looked up to him as an oracle, there would be some reason in it. . . . But those tall, ball-going, flirting, self-satisfied cousins of mine—who would have been glad enough, either of them, two months ago, to snap up me, infidelity, bad character, and all, as a charming rich young roué—if they have not learnt enough Protestantism in the last five-and-twenty years to take care of themselves, Protestantism must have very few allurements, or else be very badly carried out in practice by those who talk loudest in favour of it. . . . I heard them praising O’Blareaway’s “ministry,” by the bye, the other day. So he is up in town at last—at the summit of his ambition. Well, he may suit them. I wonder how many young creatures like Argemone and Luke he would keep from Popery!’
But there was no use arguing with a man in such a state of mind; and gradually Lancelot gave it up, in hopes that time would bring the good man to his sane wits again, and that a father’s feelings would prove themselves stronger, because more divine, than a so-called Protestant’s fears, though that would have been, in the banker’s eyes, and in the Jesuit’s also—so do extremes meet—the very reason for expecting them to be the weaker; for it is the rule with all bigots, that the right cause is always a lost cause, and therefore requires—God’s weapons of love, truth, and reason being well known to be too weak—to be defended, if it is to be saved, with the devil’s weapons of bad logic, spite, and calumny.
At last, in despair of obtaining tidings of his cousin by any other method, Lancelot made up his mind to apply to a certain remarkable man, whose ‘conversion’ had preceded Luke’s about a year, and had, indeed, mainly caused it.
He went, . . . and was not disappointed. With the most winning courtesy and sweetness, his story and his request were patiently listened to.
‘The outcome of your speech, then, my dear sir, as I apprehend it, is a request to me to send back the fugitive lamb into the jaws of the well-meaning, but still lupine wolf?’
This was spoken with so sweet and arch a smile, that it was impossible to be angry.